Harnessing high volumes of new, unstructured data offers the promise of better decision-making, greater product innovation and stronger customer relationships, but a new study warns that ‘now is the time to act’ for travel companies.

Big data has the potential to transform how travel companies deliver services to travellers, according to a major independent global study released today. The study cautions, however, that the industry is at a ‘big data crossroads’, and that businesses must make big data an urgent priority in order to truly maximise its benefits and ensure a more intelligent and responsive travel experience in the process.

At the Big Data Crossroads: turning towards a smarter travel experience charts the emergence of new technologies and strategies for managing big data, and outlines how big data can be harnessed to focus travel around customer needs and preferences, not industry processes.

Based on extensive input from Chief Information Officers and big data experts from companies around the world, including Air France-KLM, Cathay Pacific, Eurostar, Facebook, Frontier Airlines, KAYAK, Marriott Hotels and Munich Airport, key findings from the study include:

1. Now is the time to act: Professor Davenport calls on travel firms to start benchmarking their maturity against the industry whilst assembling the necessary data science skills and formulating an overall big data strategy for their organisations.

2. Big data offers major opportunities for travel companies to improve both the business and experience of travel: the benefits of big data include better decision-making, greater product and service innovation and stronger customer relationships that will be delivered by new approaches to customer management, revenue management and internal operations.

3. Pockets of innovation using big data are present in the industry today: the study includes examples of how leading travel firms are making use of big data today: from KAYAK’s price flight forecasting model, which presents customers with the likely change in a flight’s price over a seven-day window, to Air France-KLM’s use of Hadoop as the basis of a group-wide revenue management system.

4. Emerging technologies will be key to the big data evolution: the onset of new open-source software for dividing data processing jobs across multiple commodity servers, together with new types of databases including ‘columnar’ and ‘vertical’ approaches, and emerging programming languages like Python, Pig and Hive, combine to deliver the potential to harness big data.

5. The effective deployment of big data initiatives is not without challenges: the study finds that to access the big data opportunity the travel industry must overcome significant challenges, including: data fragmentation across multiple systems; co-existence of both big data and traditional data management architectures; finding and recruiting scarce big data science skills; and managing data responsibly and in the interests of all.

Thomas H. Davenport, Visiting Professor at Harvard Business School, Co-founder and Director of Research at the International Institute for Analytics, and study author, commented: “The travel industry stands at a big data crossroads today, with new technologies and techniques offering the potential to translate increasing volumes of data into higher profits and more efficient operations. Some leading companies are pioneering the use of big data and already seeing a huge impact. Airlines, airports, hotels, rail companies and travel sellers need to ask themselves if they have a big data strategy in place, and if it will allow them to be at the forefront of this opportunity.”

Hervé Couturier, Head of R&D, Amadeus says: “We are committed to facilitating discussion on key trends in order to participate in the debate around how the future of our industry will be shaped, and the key talking point right now is undoubtedly big data. It is impossible to overstate the transformative potential of big data, both in terms of improving the travel experience and how the wider industry itself operates. With this in mind, it is perhaps the single biggest opportunity in a generation for travel businesses: to embrace the changing structure of data in order to maximise it. At the same time, big data also offers us the chance to ‘put the fun back into travel’, which at its very heart is about improving the passenger experience.”

The cost to hotels for groups and meetings has been on the rise in the U.S. in recent years. According to a report from hotel benchmarking company Kalibri Labs, the cost, if left unchecked, likely will double by 2022.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer has asked the FTC to investigate whether the airline industry is data mining consumer personal information in order to charge them airfares based on things like income and purchasing behaviors.

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